Democracy Now! Blog

Photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, director and producer of the documentary film “Restrepo,” and photojournalist Chris Hondros were killed in the Libyan city of Misurata on Wednesday when a group of four photojournalists were attacked. Democracy Now! interviewed Chris Hondros in 2007 about his Pulitzer Prize-nominated photos taken in Iraq.

Oil is the source of so much pain in the world. Around the globe, wherever oil is extracted, people suffer a constellation of injuries, from coups and dictatorship to pollution, displacement and death. Pipelines leak, refineries explode, tankers break up and deep-sea drill rigs explode. The thirst for oil disrupts democracies and the climate. Not far from the burgeoning fracking fields of Colorado, Frederic “Rick” Bourke sits in a minimum-security federal prison. His crime: blowing the whistle on corruption and bribery in the oil-rich region of the Caspian Sea.

2:15pm EDT Tim DeChristopher, activist and founder of the environmental group Peaceful Uprising, called Democracy Now! with an update from the U.S. Department of Interior, where 300-400 people are outside protesting and another 50 people are inside and refusing to leave. The march comes at the end of the four-day PowerShift conference in D.C., where 10,000 activists gathered to demand a clean energy future, targeting the Dept. of the Interior for green-lighting mountaintop "coal" removal mining, oil drilling, and now massive new coal development in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. [includes rush transcript]

Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based independent consultant on energy and nuclear policy, received the Right Livelihood Award in 1997 for "serving to alert the world to the unparalleled dangers of plutonium to human life." Democracy Now! interviewed him at the 2010 Right Livelihood Awards in Bonn, Germany. [includes rush transcript]

Alyn Ware received the Right Livelihood Award in 2009 for leading initiatives in peace education and nuclear abolition in his native New Zealand and around the world for the past twenty-five years. Democracy Now! met up with him at the 2010 Right Livelihood Awards in Bonn, Germany.

The for-profit health-insurance industry in the United States is profoundly inefficient and costly, and a sane and sustainable alternative exists—single-payer, otherwise known as expanded and improved Medicare for all.

More than 2,000 journalists, activists, educators and artists from across the country gathered at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston April 8-10 to discuss issues ranging from net neutrality and racial diversity to democracy and social justice. Democracy Now! was there. [includes rush transcript]

Egyptian American engineer Mohamed Radwan was arrested in Syria on March 25 and released April 1. Democracy Now! correspondent Anjali Kamat interviewed him in his family’s home in Cairo on April 5 and filed this report. [includes rush transcript]

Former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his family were flown on March 18, 2011 by the South African government back to their home in Haiti after seven years in exile in South Africa. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman was the only reporter to join them on the journey. Here is the complete transcript of our global broadcast exclusive conversation with Aristide as he flew over the Atlantic Ocean approaching Haiti.

Muhannad Bensadik was a 21-year-old Libyan American medical student in Benghazi. He participated in the Libyan uprising last month and then decided to join the armed struggle against Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s forces. Muhannad was reportedly shot to death in fighting near Brega on Saturday, March 12, 2011.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have virtually disappeared from mainstream media coverage, Democracy Now!’s Juan Gonzalez has a wide-ranging conversation with Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader about the ongoing U.S. military occupation of these countries, the treatment of WikiLeaks accused whistleblower Bradley Manning, and how this connects to the attack on worker rights in Wisconsin and beyond. Protests against the occupations and the treatment of Manning are planned for this weekend. [includes rush transcript]

Former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has landed in Haiti and Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman is there to report the latest: "We made it through a mad crush of over a thousand journalists, videographers, supporters, dignitaries at the airport. I am now standing on the veranda of the airport where President Aristide is addressing the crowd. He is saying we will not forget the victims of the earthquake."

Former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is preparing to return to Haiti after seven years in exile. Aristide has lived in South Africa since he was deposed in a 2004 U.S.-backed coup. Reporting from Johannesburg, Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman speaks actor and activist Danny Glover as he prepares to accompany Aristide. [includes rush transcript]

The explosions and fires at four separate nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, are a haunting reminder that nuclear power can produce catastrophic results. This was the nightmare scenario the nuclear power industry assured us would never happen. Karl Grossman, a SUNY Old Westbury journalism professor and author of several books on the nuclear industry, recalls such assurances going back to the 1960s. That was when New York’s own power companies started planning a Fukushima-style cluster of nuclear reactors on Long Island.

A controversial hearing on the radicalization of the American Muslim community has opened today on Capitol Hill, led by New York Republican Rep. Peter King. Critics have described the hearings as a modern-day form of McCarthyism designed to stoke fear against American Muslims. King has refused calls to broaden the hearing to examine right-wing militias or any non-Muslim groups. We speak with Mark Potok, director of Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. [includes rush transcript]

DN! In Depth

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan — The corporate television newscasts spend more and more time covering the increasingly disruptive, costly and at times deadly weather. But they consistently fail to make the link between extreme weather and climate change.